Nancy Richmond - Cheaha Mountain Rainbows
CD
Order
Sweet Wreath presents the story of an Alabama artist with a rare gift for melody who channeled her experience into song after song like a true legend - fame and fortune be damned.
Nancy Richmond wrote over a hundred songs from the 1970s onward, exploring the emotional arcs of manic depression, relationships, and motherhood in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. Her musical basis lay in the folk-rock zeitgeist of the late 60s, but she developed a home-spun style of her own that allowed her to sing with a sweet gentleness and humor. She wrote country-tinged love spells, lullabies about fantastic creatures, and a song about hitchhiking to Neil Young's ranch during a fit of mania. Her artwork on the album cover depicts this period, a time when she lived in a "magic cabin" in California during her travels. Back in Birmingham, she performed at local hangouts like Ranelli's and Cobb Lane Restaurant, at various parties and coffee houses, and on the street in Five Points South.
Aside from a couple demo tapes made in the 1980s and 90s (in the hopes of striking a record deal in Nashville), most of Nancy's music wasn't recorded until much later when she was in her 50s and 60s. Despite working in almost total obscurity, she kept her songs alive by playing them for herself and her family over the years, writing lyrics in a spiralbound notebook until it was completely full. After meeting experimental musician Jasper Lee in 2006, the two began recording Nancy's guitar and vocal songs with Jasper accompanying on various instruments and bringing in other players to expand upon her sound. Over the course of twelve years they documented around fifty of Nancy's songs and eventually compiled an album of favorites in 2018, making a small edition of CDs for family and friends. Nancy was delighted to finally have an album of her music that she could listen to and share with people. She called it Cheaha Mountain Rainbows after the highest peak in Alabama, a place that she loved to escape to and hike with her husband Brian in the cool days of autumn.
Cheaha Mountain Rainbows is now being released on Sweet Wreath in an updated form to include Nancy's early demos and offer a detailed chronicle of her musical world. The culmination of this project comes in the wake of Nancy's passing in the spring of 2024; it is an homage to a dear friend and kindred creative spirit. "I've always loved her songs and hoped to get Nancy's music out to more people for years, ever since Sweet Wreath started," Jasper says. "It was wonderful to get some CDs into Nancy's hands several years ago, so that she could share them with her friends. Making that album was a real labor of love that we worked on together for a long time. She would have periods of deep depression when she couldn't play or do very much, and there were also manic periods when she would be full of energy, extremely talkative and charming to be around. She was so funny and captivating, a great storyteller. I saw the full spectrum of her condition and understood that we could only record sporadically, when she was feeling good. We just kept recording off and on, for years and years. Now it feels imperative for her music to be available for anyone to hear...it's really beautiful."
“When I first met Nancy, I was amazed at how many good songs she had, and how she knew most of them from memory. Some of her music was written in the 70s, but hadn't ever been recorded, so it was like finding lost treasure...music from a mythic era. It's interesting to think about Nancy carrying these around in her head for 25 or 30 years before we recorded them. That's pretty unusual and incredible. She seemed like a lost "lady of the canyon"...a singer in the vein of Linda Perhacs or Vashti Bunyan that went completely under the radar...even more so than they did. She never made the connections that might have led to even a small amount of exposure. She tried a couple times to find a way into a musical career, but was really wary of getting ripped off, and rightly so. One time she drove to a recording studio in Nashville with a demo tape and they said, "What's a nice girl like you doing trying to get into this business? This is a dirty business." She meticulously mailed all her lyrics to the U.S. copyright office so she had a record of when they were written, in case anyone ever tried to claim one of her songs as their own. She was confident in the quality of her material....just listen to Proud to Be My Man or Let's Play Pretend. Those sound like prime time at the Grand Ole Opry. My personal favorites are songs like Honey Bathing Lemon Rinds, where she gets into some mystical terrain and you're not quite sure what's going on, but it's totally enchanting.” -Jasper
CD
Order
Sweet Wreath presents the story of an Alabama artist with a rare gift for melody who channeled her experience into song after song like a true legend - fame and fortune be damned.
Nancy Richmond wrote over a hundred songs from the 1970s onward, exploring the emotional arcs of manic depression, relationships, and motherhood in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. Her musical basis lay in the folk-rock zeitgeist of the late 60s, but she developed a home-spun style of her own that allowed her to sing with a sweet gentleness and humor. She wrote country-tinged love spells, lullabies about fantastic creatures, and a song about hitchhiking to Neil Young's ranch during a fit of mania. Her artwork on the album cover depicts this period, a time when she lived in a "magic cabin" in California during her travels. Back in Birmingham, she performed at local hangouts like Ranelli's and Cobb Lane Restaurant, at various parties and coffee houses, and on the street in Five Points South.
Aside from a couple demo tapes made in the 1980s and 90s (in the hopes of striking a record deal in Nashville), most of Nancy's music wasn't recorded until much later when she was in her 50s and 60s. Despite working in almost total obscurity, she kept her songs alive by playing them for herself and her family over the years, writing lyrics in a spiralbound notebook until it was completely full. After meeting experimental musician Jasper Lee in 2006, the two began recording Nancy's guitar and vocal songs with Jasper accompanying on various instruments and bringing in other players to expand upon her sound. Over the course of twelve years they documented around fifty of Nancy's songs and eventually compiled an album of favorites in 2018, making a small edition of CDs for family and friends. Nancy was delighted to finally have an album of her music that she could listen to and share with people. She called it Cheaha Mountain Rainbows after the highest peak in Alabama, a place that she loved to escape to and hike with her husband Brian in the cool days of autumn.
Cheaha Mountain Rainbows is now being released on Sweet Wreath in an updated form to include Nancy's early demos and offer a detailed chronicle of her musical world. The culmination of this project comes in the wake of Nancy's passing in the spring of 2024; it is an homage to a dear friend and kindred creative spirit. "I've always loved her songs and hoped to get Nancy's music out to more people for years, ever since Sweet Wreath started," Jasper says. "It was wonderful to get some CDs into Nancy's hands several years ago, so that she could share them with her friends. Making that album was a real labor of love that we worked on together for a long time. She would have periods of deep depression when she couldn't play or do very much, and there were also manic periods when she would be full of energy, extremely talkative and charming to be around. She was so funny and captivating, a great storyteller. I saw the full spectrum of her condition and understood that we could only record sporadically, when she was feeling good. We just kept recording off and on, for years and years. Now it feels imperative for her music to be available for anyone to hear...it's really beautiful."
“When I first met Nancy, I was amazed at how many good songs she had, and how she knew most of them from memory. Some of her music was written in the 70s, but hadn't ever been recorded, so it was like finding lost treasure...music from a mythic era. It's interesting to think about Nancy carrying these around in her head for 25 or 30 years before we recorded them. That's pretty unusual and incredible. She seemed like a lost "lady of the canyon"...a singer in the vein of Linda Perhacs or Vashti Bunyan that went completely under the radar...even more so than they did. She never made the connections that might have led to even a small amount of exposure. She tried a couple times to find a way into a musical career, but was really wary of getting ripped off, and rightly so. One time she drove to a recording studio in Nashville with a demo tape and they said, "What's a nice girl like you doing trying to get into this business? This is a dirty business." She meticulously mailed all her lyrics to the U.S. copyright office so she had a record of when they were written, in case anyone ever tried to claim one of her songs as their own. She was confident in the quality of her material....just listen to Proud to Be My Man or Let's Play Pretend. Those sound like prime time at the Grand Ole Opry. My personal favorites are songs like Honey Bathing Lemon Rinds, where she gets into some mystical terrain and you're not quite sure what's going on, but it's totally enchanting.” -Jasper